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Labour Call for Compromise on Disposal: Industrial Trouble ?
Page 51
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BY OUR PARLIAMENTARY CORRESPONDENT
ANOTHER appeal for the cessation of denationalization was made in the House of Commons last week by Mr. James Callaghan (Lab.). Speaking during the debate on the industrial situation, he said that the profit of about £8m. made last year by British Road Services was being thrown away.
Even now, it was not too late for the Government to halt the process. Less than half the undertaking had been sold.
" The Government have got what they wanted out of their policy," he said. They have got the small men back into the industry again. They have raised the limit of operation—the mileage limit that was a great bone of contention between the two sides.
"Why cannot the Government halt th:s process now? I believe that if they did so. they would reverse a step with which most of the country disagrees— the selling of British Road Services — and they would thus contribute to creating some measure orharmony and peace within the industry.
"Even now, I beg the Government to reconsider their attitude towards this matter. There is no face for them to lose, and I assure them that they would gain in stature if they do this."
Dangers of " Automation "
Dealing with future industrial relations, Mr. Charles Pannell (Lab.) painted a dark picture of the future if " automation" were introduced quickly.
The Standard Motor Co., Ltd., he said, had floated a new issue to raise Min. of new capital to finance toolingup for increased production. A machine which cost £100,000 had been imported from Germany to perform automatically all six machining operations on a cylinder head and to give a much higher output with only two men than 22 men could now produce with conventional machine tockls worked singly or in pairs.
It was under the threat of the automatic factory, Mr. Pannell said, that the American trade unions were staging lightning strikes in the General Motors Corporation and the Ford company.
The engineering employers, however, still stood by the doctrine of 1897 that there was to be no workers' consultation in the engineering industry. If automation were introduced with the speed that was prophesied in some quarters, there .would be a great industrial uph'eaval. Now was the time to prepare for it. The duty rested on the Minister of Labour to tell the unions that there must be a positive attitude towards the change.
The set-up in industry must be a common council to which people would come, not as suppliants on their knees, but as men on their feet.
Federation Blamed
Mr. Pannell did not blame individual manufacturers, but the whole Engineering Employers' Federation, who had refused to set up a joint council.
Mr. Watkinson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour, replied that there was a proper channel of procedure in the engineering industry, which went from the floor of the shop to the top, On both the workers' and employer' sides.
[A group of European technicians, sociologists and trade unionists, working under the auspices of the 0.E.E.C. European Productivity Agency, has been studying the use of automatic production control processes. An inquiry is now to be conducted in member countries of the organization. The group will then fix the date of an international symposium to be attended by experts from member countries engaged upon the technical, economic and social problems raised by automation. An American expert said that the heavy cost of the new technique would act as a brake that would allow time for both management and labour to adapt themselves to it.]